> On 19 Jul 2019, at 15:04, Philip Thrift <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > On Friday, July 19, 2019 at 7:51:04 AM UTC-5, Quentin Anciaux wrote: > > > Le ven. 19 juil. 2019 à 14:45, Philip Thrift <[email protected] > <javascript:>> a écrit : > > > Well matter is bizarre enough on its own. > > Read the latest science news on new discoveries in materials science. > > I don't see why you would want to add ghosts into the mix. > > Where did I talk about ghosts ? nowhere, but you did. > > I'm only talking about your assertion your beliefs are not *bizarre* > (contrary to others who are bizarre)... I'm just saying they are bizarre > (your beliefs) as anything about reality is. So can you explain why yours are > not *bizarre* and others are. > > > > > If one believe in immaterial entities (that are beyond being just fictional, > like Sherlock Holmes, or numbers),
I gently and politely confessed that you make me laugh a little bit, by classifying Sherlock Holmes and the numbers together to oppose them to Ghosts. You know, there has been an incredible event last century. When the mathematicians made sense of analysis, working motivated by the math needed to solve the Heat equation, they build a rather powerful theory, set theory, which assumes the existence of infinity, which unfortunately appears to be inconsistant. They thought they could be able to secure it by working no more about sets, but about the numbers/words used to describe them, so that they could secure the use of infinity in mathematics, by the secure finite realm of numbers and words, which was felt at that time as the most secure thing conceivable. That was the goal of the Hilbert’s program: to secure the use of fictive infinities through the concrete natural number relations (that everybody learn in high school). But then came Gödel, 1931 (albeit already in Emil Post personal notes in 1922, for the main thing up to “my discovery” and even the difficulties!) Gödel, who like all mathematicians considered elementary arithmetic has indeed the most secure thing ever, showed that this small amount of security is already unable to justify that security, still less the calling of the infinite or the infinities. A total reversal occurs in logic and mathematics. Tarski dared to propose a theory of truth, and others developed a theory (Model Theory) where, mathematicians used the infinities to secure the construction made when starting with words and numbers, and shown extraordinary relation between both. It gives almost a severe criteria of the difference between science and religion/metaphysics, which indeed is the same as the one of the universal machine itself: - science is when you can express your idea in first order logic - religion is when you need second order logic, and that leads to informal, but non testable or checkable arguments (yet is quite efficacious). That is related with the fact that with mechanism we can and must (actually) assume “only” the natural numbers, or the words, or the finite sets, and all the rest, that is: analysis, set theory, physics belongs to the phenomenology (yet partially sharable) of the numbers trying to understand themselves. So, as I told you already, I am OK with mathematics is fiction/religion/theology already, like physics, except for arithmetic. One day I might try to explain why the natural numbers are as much undefinable than consciousness. Before Gödel we thought we could secure the infinities with the finite numbers, but after Gödel we use the infinities to measure how much the finite numbers are incontrollable and get incredibly complex semantic. A semantic is just that, a use of infinity to make sense of a number/words/code/machine … I bought recently a chef-d’oeuvre in set theory, in french (for a change) “Théorie des Ensembles”(set theory) by Patrick Dehornois. It contains also a good chapter on mathematical logic, including RA, PA, in first and second order logic. In computer science, the semantic are given by infinities, which can be seen as real numbers, and descriptive set theory is related to recursion (computability) theory, almost like complex analysis is used in (extensional) Number Theory. I might explain the Goldstein sequence (well explained in Dehornois’ book), which illustrate “quickly” the role of the infinite ordinals to tell us something about a machine/program/word/finite-things. The computations with oracle are sort of (relatively constructive) real numbers. You can see an analogy, machine being natural number, but then you have the computation which does not stop, but with clear finite loops, like with a rational number 0,131313131313.., and the computation which never stop, but are “creative”, which never repeat themselves, like the square root of 2, or pi, or e. > those are ghosts one believes in. The existence of gost is complementary to all this. A materialist will imagine that a ghost is made of just unknown matter. An immaterialist will take it as a possible new case of prestidigitalism, as the universal number can make us believe many things, which makes the research possible and interesting. To be sure, the term ghost is not pretty well defined in the literature. My favorite ghost movie is the Korean movie “Hello Ghost”. > > I'm just saying it's bizarre to me. But a lot of people believe in ghosts, or > whatever they name the immaterial entities they believe in. A materialist believer in ghosts could believe that a ghost is a bunch of fermions and bosons, or superstrings. Just arranged differently. In the Aristotelian (*weakly* materialist) context, immaterial is often used for “inexistent”, but we have to decide of the ontology first, and then explain other existence in terms of what is assumed. My point is that with mechanism, assuming more than Arithmetic leads to insuperable difficulties in the phenomenologies. To avoid confusion it is important to keep in mind that I use the term materialism always in the weak-materialist sense: a materialist is a believe/assumer in Matter, and an immaterialist is someone agnostic if not rather skeptical about such Matter (not someone believing in some “immaterialist fantaisies”). And by a scientist, I mean someone who does not object to the use of elementary arithmetic. For example, he does not change his kids’ schools when he learned that they are taught elementary arithmetic. That is the amount needed for realism, even if set theory and richer theory are needed to get the gist of the phenomenologies, which are the interesting things. Matter is not a simple or clear concept. The only progress is that with quantum mechanics, physicists are aware that matter is not a simple and clear concept. I do love looking many video in cosmology, but I do think that the physical universe has a simple purely mathematical reason, and the recent explosion of our ignorance in arithmetic (like illustrated by the theory of degrees of unsolvability) makes me just questioning all metaphysics, and more open to the simplest one, like the (Neo)Pythagorean one. Bruno > > @philipthrift > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/2da429da-36f4-45e0-ae6d-9ff0a999f267%40googlegroups.com > > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/2da429da-36f4-45e0-ae6d-9ff0a999f267%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/30AF883E-68F8-4288-8554-543C013D4FF8%40ulb.ac.be.
